The Church's Book

Theology of Scripture in Ecclesial Context

Brad East

• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781467464963
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

What role do varied understandings of the church play in the doctrine and interpretation of Scripture?

In The Church's Book, Brad East explores recent accounts of the Bible and its exegesis in modern theology and traces the differences made by divergent, and sometimes opposed, theological accounts of the church. Surveying first the work of Karl Barth, then that of John Webster, Robert Jenson, andJohn Howard Yoder (following an excursus on interpretingYoder's work in light of his abuse), East delineates the distinct understandings of Scripture embedded in the different traditions that these notable scholars represent. In doing so, he offers new insight into the current impasse between Christians in their understandings of Scripture—one determined far less by hermeneutical approaches than by ecclesiological disagreements.

East's study is especially significant amid the current prominence of the theological interpretation of Scripture, which broadly assumes that the Bible ought to be read in a way that foregrounds confessional convictions and interests. As East discusses in the introduction to his book, that approach to Scripture cannot be separated from questions of ecclesiology—in other words, how we interpret the Bible theologically is dependent upon the context in which we interpret it.

PART II

Which Church?

Division, Authority, and Catholicity

CHAPTER 3

John Webster

The Holiness of Scripture in the Reformed Church

Scripture is not the church’s book … what the church hears in Scripture is not its own voice.¹

The Wissenschaftlichkeit of exegesis is its orientation to Scripture as the church’s book, that is, a text which has its place in that sphere of human life and history which is generated by God’s revelation. To read it otherwise is not to read it, but to misread it by mislocating and therefore misconstruing the text.²

The question … is whether it is more appropriate to speak of the people of the book or the book of the people.³

Rejection of sola scriptura in favor of Scripture and tradition is … a corollary of a rejection of the ecclesiological implications of solus Christus.⁴

John Webster was a theologian’s theologian.⁵ Although his initial theological training did not prefigure it, Webster’s professional trajectory was marked by an ever-increasing appreciation of the classical intellectual heritage of the Christian tradition and, in particular, the integrity and dignity of the office of theologian. His public profile was quiet and unimposing, but his theological journey was far from static. After study of Barth (“the grand old man of Basel”) rescued him from the methodological navel-gazing, as he saw it, of doctrinal criticism and modern philosophy,⁶ he continued to move forward by looking further and further backward: to Reformed divines, to Lutheran scholastics, to the whole premodern inheritance of the church, not least such patristic and medieval masters as St. Augustine, St. Gregory the Great, and St. Thomas Aquinas. There he found a rich storehouse of penetrating perception of what he understood to be the great theme of Christian dogmatics: the singular perfection of God the Holy Trinity.⁷

Whatever the locus of doctrinal discussion, Webster believed that everything in theology turns on the one and only God, replete in himself, complete in beatitude, alone without want or need because full without measure.⁸ Where theology forgets to begin and end with this One, declines to gaze in his direction with endless delight, and neglects to feast on him with inexhaustible adoration, theology has lost its way. For theology without the Lord at its center is theology unworthy of the name.

We come to know this God as he gives himself to us. Thus the doctrine of Scripture is ingredient within the dogmatic corpus. In addition to theology proper and christology, Webster devoted himself to the doctrine of Scripture with unflagging zeal across his career. When engaging Webster on this topic it will do the reader well to bear in mind the shifts in sources and modes alluded to above. For the most part I interpret Webster’s writings as all of a piece, but occasionally I make a point to note where the Barthian register is more pronounced in his earlier as compared to his later work.⁹ Scott Swain is right to call Webster’s thought “dogmatic theology in a … Reformed and Thomistic key.”¹⁰ To whatever extent it remains Barthian, it is always Reformed and, by the end, tracks quite closely with the summative scholastic approach represented by St. Thomas and his heirs (not all of them Catholic).¹¹ Furthermore, it is worth mentioning that Webster was a British theologian ordained as a priest in the Church of England. He regularly preached the word and presided at the sacrament.¹² Yet he undertook his work in a national-cultural context of both formal establishment and post-Christian secularism.¹³ This is distinct from the American contexts inhabited by Jenson and Yoder, even as Webster occupied the somewhat overlooked Calvin-friendly wing of that rambunctious communion called Anglicanism.¹⁴ Finally, Webster’s modus operandi as a theologian, not least with respect to modern and postmodern anxieties about method, was simply to get on with it.¹⁵ In his words, “description is a great deal more interesting and persuasive than apology.” He thus “work[ed] on the assumption of the truthfulness and helpfulness of the Christian confession, and [did not] devote too much time and energy developing arguments in its favor or responses to its critical denials.”¹⁶ As fresh and emboldening as readers find this approach to be (and I am among them), we will see below that it is simultaneously Webster’s greatest strength and his greatest weakness.

This chapter consists of three sections, a pattern that holds for the next two chapters. First, bibliology: Webster’s theology of Holy Scripture as the sanctified instrument of the risen and ascended Lord Christ to teach, rebuke, enliven, and judge the church in its dispersed life among the nations. Second, ecclesiology: Webster’s theology of the church as the creature of the divine Word, constituted by the divine address, and wholly recipient in the gift of faith confessed by the community across time. Third, analysis: here I unpack Webster’s arrangement of the relevant dogmatic loci, focusing in particular on his coordination of the relationship between the doctrines of God, church, and Scripture. Explication and critique are interwoven in what follows; comparison with Jenson and Yoder must wait until Part III.

Bibliology: The Holiness of Scripture

This section takes up Webster’s theology of Scripture. I consider, in sequence, the nature or ontology of Scripture, its character as a medium of Christ, and its reception in the church via canonization and interpretation. Close exposition of Webster’s texts will give way to critique as the section moves toward ecclesiology. This shift is not an accident. There are serious issues with Webster’s surprisingly contrastive depiction of divine and human agency, and these are felt most acutely when he turns to ecclesial activity in relation to the canon of Scripture. The question this problem raises for us is whether the sort of thick account of divine action articulated by Webster must generate, or degenerate into, a thin ecclesiology. Or can it be retained without curtailing the full-bodied and mediating action of the church?

The Nature of Scripture

Webster’s doctrinal matryoshka doll is both classical and Barthian. It begins with the doctrine of God the Trinity, whose life in se is perfect, simple, and complete, infinitely replete with fullness of life, beauty, goodness, and peace. God is a se; he needs neither to create nor, having created, to save fallen creatures. Yet this very fact is the condition of the possibility for salvation history: divine aseity is the ground of divine grace.¹⁷

The doctrine of the Trinity includes an account of the divine works both ad intra (the eternal processions of Son and Spirit) and ad extra (the temporal missions of Son and Spirit in the incarnation and the outpouring at Pentecost). Talk of the divine sendings leads, in turn, to discussion of the economy of grace, that is, the whole movement of God’s free turning to fallen humanity, in which God communicates the fullness of himself in mercy and love to restore and elevate sinful and rebellious creatures to unbreakable fellowship with himself. As an element within this gracious movement, Holy Scripture serves and attests the self-communicative presence of God, through which God speaks, as from a human temple, the good news of the gospel of Christ.¹⁸ Which is to say, through Scripture God the Word speaks the word of God.

How does Webster understand revelation? As he defines it, “revelation is the self-presentation of the triune God, the free work of sovereign mercy in which God wills, establishes and perfects saving fellowship with himself in which humankind comes to know, love and fear him above all things.”¹⁹ God is at once revelation’s wholly free agent and its content; the matter of revelation is nothing other than God’s triune being in spiritual self-presence, initiated by nothing other than God’s gracious will, and as such is a mystery. Furthermore, “revelation is purposive,”²⁰ it has a telos: the restoration of our nature, the establishment of fellowship, the perfection of our life with God. The work of revelation is one and the same as the work of reconciliation. God reveals as God saves, for “God’s action towards the world is personal: not merely the operation of a causal force, but intentional action which establishes relations and proffers meaning.”²¹ “Revelation is [therefore] the corollary of trinitarian theology and soteriology.”²² In short, though talk of revelation may deal secondarily with questions of epistemology, or of faith and theology’s sources and norms, “its material content … is the sovereign goodness of Father, Son and Spirit in willing, realizing and perfecting saving fellowship.”²³

From revelation Webster turns immediately to christology and bibliology, doctrinal loci bound together by one of the most dominant themes of his thought: “The gospel’s God is eloquent: he does not remain locked in silence, but speaks.”²⁴ More specifically, “God speaks as in the Spirit Jesus Christ speaks.”²⁵ How so? Webster writes:

The eternal Word made flesh, now enthroned at the right hand of the Father, is present and eloquent. His state of exaltation does not entail his absence from or silence within the realm within which he once acted in self-humiliation; rather, his exaltation is the condition for and empowerment of his unhindered activity and address of creatures. This address takes the form of Holy Scripture. To accomplish his communicative mission, the exalted Son takes into his service a textual tradition, a set of human writings, so ordering their course that by him they are made into living creaturely instruments of his address of living creatures. Extending himself into the structures and practices of human communication in the sending of the Holy Spirit, the divine Word commissions and sanctifies these texts to become fitting vehicles of his self-proclamation. He draws their acts into his own act of self-utterance, so that they become the words of the Word, human words uttered as a repetition of the divine Word, existing in the sphere of the divine Word’s authority, effectiveness and promise.²⁶

A number of things are worth drawing out further here.

First, the Bible is what it is—Holy Scripture—in virtue of divine action. Strictly speaking, this is universally true: everything that exists is what it is—insofar as it is created, sustained, ordered, and directed in being—in virtue of divine action, for this is only to say that God, as Creator, is providentially sovereign over creation. But the Bible is not what it is in the same way that, say, The Iliad and Macbeth are the texts that they are. God has a unique relationship to the texts of the biblical canon, such that together they are Holy Scripture: the servant of the divine address to intelligent creatures. “Scripture has its being in its reference to the activity of God”; apart from this reference, “it becomes reified into an independent entity whose nature and operations can be grasped apart from the network of relations in which it is properly located.”²⁷ Such reification is a product not only of naturalist and non-theological approaches to the Bible; it happened first of all in “the gradual assimilation of Scripture into theological epistemology in the post-Reformation period,”²⁸ and can be seen as well in ostensibly “theological” proposals for interpretation of Scripture that strain to justify the presence of the modifier. For talk of God and God’s action is not much in evidence.

Second, it follows that the Bible is not an end in itself,²⁹ nor should second-order consideration of how to read it overtake the principal object of theology’s concern: namely, God and all things in God. Thus: “bibliology is prior to hermeneutics,” and both “are derivative elements of Christian theology.”³⁰ Proper “depiction” of Holy Scripture therefore requires that one “deploy language of the triune God’s saving and revelatory action.”³¹ Why? Answer: “The ruler and judge over all other Christian doctrines is the doctrine of the Holy Trinity,”³² for “all other Christian doctrines are applications or corollaries of the one doctrine, the doctrine of the Trinity.”³³ Within a different doctrinal locus, that of soteriology, Webster insists that the doctrine of justification is not, as Luther called it, the articulus stantis et cadentis ecclesiae, nor rector et iudex super omnia genera doctrinarum. Such claims attest the pathology of a (typically modern) dogmatic vision that subordinates aseity to promeity.³⁴ So with Scripture: it is not a free-standing or anthropocentric topic, but ordered to, and thus a subset of, the doctrine of the triune God.³⁵

Third, dogmatics is, for Webster, “the servant of exegesis.”³⁶ Bibliology, “as a piece of dogmatics,” is therefore “wholly subordinate to the primary work of the church’s theology, which is exegesis.”³⁷ In this way the task of bibliology is doubly circumscribed: on one side by its theoretical subordination (to the doctrine of God), on the other by its practical subordination (to the task of exegesis). Theology of Scripture is a work of dogmatic assistance: it “cannot presume to anticipate or control exegetical work, to which it is an ancillary science,” but assists exegesis “by portraying ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword by Stephen E. Fowl
• Acknowledgments
• I Whose Book?: History, Academy, and Church
• II Which Church?: Division, Authority, and Catholicity
• III Holy Scripture: The Church’s Book in Mission, Tradition, and Doctrine
• Bibliography